Misconceptions
by L. Cadaver
Summary: She wanted to experience it - to walk through the land of the dead in order to know that she was alive. Slight ItaSaku. May turn into a full story.
1. Prologue

_Misconceptions_

He stood across the clearing, his midnight hair gently lifting from his face by the breeze. He looked so soft, so lonely, but he was proof that looks are often deceptive in an injurious way to the perceiver. This man was lethal—most would run to cower in the shadows at the instant of recognition.

This was the moment that she had spent the last four years training for. Every drop of sweat shed by her pores and every ounce of blood released by her cuts were sacrifices for this battle. She was no fool, and knew full well that this would be the most challenging fight that she would ever be honored enough to participate in.

Losing was not an option. She had been in pursuit of this stone-hearted demon for many years that had long since passed. This person was at fault for one great mishap in her life story, and he racked up another debt by continuing to be a threat to what happiness she had left.

When she told people why she trained so hard, they laughed and replied, "But don't you specialize in genjutsu, honey? You'll be useless against him. I mean, he uses the sharingan. You should dedicate your time to working in the hospital more."

The lack of faith in her skills was something that had not changed since her early childhood; eventually, she became apathetic to it. It stopped hurting each new time that someone doubted her abilities simply because it was not something _truly_ new.

She should really be more excited—instead, her thoughts were governed by apathy. The many years of training hardened her heart and aged her soul. She should be thrilled, overwhelmed, or nervous; this was the fight that all her efforts were put toward. Regardless of how she _should_ feel, her current state-of-mind was preferable for the task ahead; she was here to win, and her mindset would enable that.

Justice would reign on this day. This wretch would pay for his vile sins. Surely, he would not beg for his life, and he would not show his pain, but he would feel it. She did not need a display of agony to achieve satisfaction—she simply needed to have solid knowledge of its presence.

She turned her attention to her foe; he seemed to be waiting for her to do something. Perhaps he was unsure of her malicious intentions, or maybe he was another doubtful being that decided that she did not warrant his interest. Either way, he was her enemy; his current thoughts were not of her concern—his actions, however, were.

With the deadness of a thousand ancient corpses lurking in her eyes she announced, "This is the day that a great prodigy shall fall to never rise again."

At these words, his head shot up and his coal eyes narrowed. Yet, still, he seemed to wait for her to take action—and so she complied. Without hesitation, she clapped her hands together in front of her, folding all her fingers down except her pointers. Onlookers would probably be confused—a normal person would not be able to see what she was doing. However, from those fingers a slice of air raced out and soared in the direction of the man's heart.

This would not do the job, but it would certainly force him to come out and play. The ground where he had been standing exploded into a cloud of dust as her jutsu made contact. Without waiting to see the results, she lifted her leg in the air and slammed it down onto the ground in front of her; she wanted to lay out the limits for their battlefield, and was successful when an enormous crater spread from the focal point of where her heel had come into contact with the ground.

When she looked up, he was in front of her—she smirked. It was highly beneficial that he came to her since, after all, close-ranged battles were her specialty. Wasting no time, he stepped on the ankle of the foot that still rested on the ground from where she had landed the kick and launched his fist into her gut while he had her trapped.

Her grin did not falter as she grabbed hold of the wrist of the hand that was sinking into her stomach and sent a jolt of electricity through his body. He went wide-eyed and silent as the volts coursed through his system, only to poof into a cloud.

A clone. Her eyes narrowed and she sent out a kick behind her. To her surprise and satisfaction, she felt cloth brush up against that foot; she had almost landed a deadly blow. She spun around to face him, and there he was.

"Who are you?" he asked.

She sneered in response, "A girl who doesn't enjoy small-talk." His sharingan flashed on.

Slipping into stance, she punched the air in front of her and sent out of a wave of tornado-like winds.

He stood to her right, "I don't know you."

"Ah, yes. But I know all about you," she smiled wistfully, then specified, "Kakashi and Jiraiya told me quite a bit of useful information. Oh, and I had to deal with a particular someone pissing and moaning about you at every chance. Really, I know you enough that you could be my best friend."

She decided to be upfront about her desires; leaning in and hissed with that ill-begotten smirk on her face, "Use it, I dare you. Take me to the land of the dead, the place so miserable that even the devil cries, where angels turn to dust and souls are sucked out of the mouths of the living. Show me."

His chest grew full and his cheeks puffed out, until a large ball of fire came roaring in her direction. She did a flip to the side in order to dodge and the flame darted on past her, continuing on its path into the distance.

"Are you afraid to use it? Or am I so weak that you would simply be putting your mighty abilities to waste?" she called with contempt and challenge dripping from her words.

A flock of ravens flew overhead. Her knees collapsed inward under sudden pressure and he stood in front of her, offering her a hand up. Not her opponent, but_ him_. She sighed heavily—she was tired.

"Kai."

He was no longer there; he was never there to begin with. It was only genjutsu.

Her laughter rang—it lacked heartiness, "Are your eyes soul searchers that dig out my deepest desires and use them against me? Or do you just have a developed intuition? Are you part-time murderer, part-time heartbreaker?"

She found herself suddenly surrounded by a ring of black fire. She had been warned about this—this was serious. However, she quickly noticed something strange about the situation: her opponent stood in this fiery circle with her. He should be standing on the outside, safely watching her, smirking as the flames engulfed and smothered her, as they melted off her skin until there was nothing left of her but ashes.

However, if he felt safe enough to be standing in the circle, that either meant he had a death wish, or an escape route—the latter sounded more likely. And if he could make it out of the blazing inferno, then she could as well.

"Welcome to hell," he announced. And then he disappeared.

She knew that she was going to have to do something drastic to escape her current predicament. Her eyebrows furrowed as she quickly formed a lengthy series of hand seals. With her last seal, everything became very still; the wind no longer blew and the air seemed perfectly unmoving. In two swift movements, she pushed her palms outward, and then flipped them to face her body. The ground shook and she felt nauseous. Her world was spinning as her lungs were overwhelmed with the air that she had drawn toward herself.

Immediately, the wall of flames surrounding her collapsed into nothingness—she had starved them of oxygen and overwhelmed their power with carbon dioxide. Her breathing was labored from the crushing force that she had induced upon her lungs.

He was nowhere to be seen. Just as she jumped backward, a fist popped out of the ground from where she had just been standing—following that fist was a body. Her hand reached out, grabbed his arm, and pulled him toward her; she seized his vulnerable moment and jabbed her knee into his stomach. The hand in which she held his arm clenched and bones cracked.

Their eyes met. Her heart raced. Nothing happened; he continued to deny her request.

He pulled out of her grip and hopped backward until he felt secure with the distance between them. He seemed to recognize that any more closed-ranged combat with her would be hazardous for his wellbeing.

She flung kunai in his direction—he easily dodged each one as it came. Unlike him, she was not quite as lucky. Blades from behind ripped through her clothing and dragged across her back. Her still-laborious breathing had lowered her vigilance; this was quickly becoming dangerous.

The open wounds on her back burned with a fierceness that harkened ill news—those daggers had been poison-tipped. She had to act fast before she ended up in a comatose state or, more likely, dead. Closing her eyes, she concentrated her chakra around the cuts and worked to push out the toxins.

As she maneuvered the intruding substance out of her bloodstream, she found herself wishing that she had been born to the Hyuuga clan—X-ray vision would be incredibly helpful when fighting an Akatsuki member with her eyes closed.

"_Vigilance_," she mentally reminded herself. Considering that she had not been dismembered in the few seconds that her eyes had been sealed shut, there might be a chance that he was kindly giving her a personal moment. The more likely reason that she was still alive, however, was that he was waiting for something—and that was enough to make anyone uneasy.

As soon as she was certain that the poison had been expelled from her body, her eyes popped open to meet the swirling red of her opponent's. He was finally going to appease her previous demands; he was giving in; he was going all-out. This made her heart beat erratically. She knew it would be painful and that it would surely leave behind a mental agony so powerful that it might drive her to suicide, but she wanted to experience it—to walk through the land of the dead in order to know that she was alive.

"Are you sure this is what you want?" he whispered. His face was so close to hers that his breath caressed her cheek.

The corner of her mouth twitched. "Absolutely."

"It is most unfortunate that," he paused, "in these tedious lives we are forced to live that we do not receive everything we want."

Just as the last utterance floated past his grim lips, he disappeared from sight.

* * *

Time wandered aimlessly, passing her by while she gazed into her inner abyss, not quite thinking, breathing, moving, or even feeling. All she knew is that she just watched years of focus and training vanish; she should have known that such things were evanescent. Life and purpose warped in her mind, warped into spoken words, laboriously pressing against her lips.

"Perhaps…perhaps when I said 'prodigy,' I was referring to myself."


	2. Chapter 1

I decided to re-upload this chapter after rereading it and discovering a host of errors - they were all in the second half, so it was just evidence of the progressive fatigue that was plaguing me yesterday... Hopefully I caught them all. Enjoy~

1

She wanted to scream. Every cell in her peritoneal cavity was vibrating in resentment to her self-control; even her organs hated her.

She was left with nothing—no feelings, no direction, and no purpose. Her being wavered on the edge of existence and she floated through purgatory alone.

He was long gone, and with him he took all those things she once had only to stow them away with what he had already (knowingly or not) taken. That man had unwittingly stolen her hope, her innocence, her love, and her faith; he had carved out her insides and left her to be nothing more than an empty shell of her former self.

Giving up seemed to be the most alluring route. But what would she be giving up on? Her mission? Her efforts? Her life? Herself?

Her attempt to kill the demon had been thwarted by not only his flight, but also her emotional turmoil. She could continue to hunt him down for the next several decades until she found him again, but really, would it be worth it? Would she be able to overcome herself to sink the knife in his heart and walk away as he bled dry after all of those exchanges that had just taken place?

There was so much confusion and self-loathing poisoning her soul that it was suffocating. She hated it, and herself, and _everything_. She wanted to scream and, and break every bone in her own body just to sit through the painstaking labor of re-healing them. She wanted to feel something for the sake of knowing that she was alive and present and tangible.

"I have nothing…I am nothing."

She could hear herself, so perhaps that was a start. And wasn't living with nothing the sacred and respected way of the monks? She could possibly be on the cusp of some sort of spiritual enlightenment. But instead of feeling content, her soul felt parched.

She touched her lips together and parted them the minimal amount possible to speak and announced, "I need to reconcile with myself."

But what did that entail? She could return to Konoha and meditate for every waking hour she had physiologically available. Or maybe she could go home and start gardening. She always imagined that as being a soulful hobby. Perhaps she could go back and simply give away everything she owned and start from scratch.

No matter how many ideas she ran through, she rejected them just as quickly as they came. There was an unappealing flavor to each one, something that they shared. After a moment of consideration, she realized that there _was_ a common faulty factor involved in each of them—and that was _going home_.

She needed to get away from everything and that included her hometown. And suddenly, such understanding sunk like a heavy weight in the sea of her stomach. It wasn't so much that she would miss it as it was what she would become when she did not return—a missing nin. She would be labeled a wanted criminal, and probably of the S-rank with bounties amounting to fortunes on her head. It would break Tsunade's heart to order such things, but it would break her sanity much more than that.

This was what she needed to do. She would leave her everything that equated to nothing behind. She would become a hermit somewhere in the mountains and build herself a humble home, and maybe the garden would come in handy, too. She would live peacefully alone.

The idea sounded so splendid that a smile twitched on her face. Not in a rush, but not wanting to wait around, she lifted herself into an alert posture and began to walk—not run—in the direction of the dense forest that would lead her to the mountains. She was on her way to a new life.

* * *

It would take forty-eight hours before she would be placed on the missing nin list. This would give her some time to cover her tracks and dig herself into her hermitlike hole.

She had decided to keep the pace that she had set earlier that day—slow. Even if she had only two days before she'd need to start fending off bounty hunters, it was relaxing to not rush everywhere all the time.

On her way she had wondered a few times if what she was doing was selfish. Was she simply forfeiting responsibility? Was she suddenly scared of the man she had set out to fight? Was she becoming lazy? It didn't take much thought to decide that the answers to each question respectively were "yes," "yeah, right," and "probably."

She was now at the foot of the mountains. As she climbed up their gentle stretching slopes, she planned to move to their back so that she would be shielded from any ill weather. Despite moving so slow, she had traveled far—so far that she wondered if Fate had helped by moving the ground beneath her feet. The wilderness smiled at her as she passed and offered her guidance each time she had a moment of doubt. This place was meant to be her new home.

She came to an abrupt halt when she noticed that the light wasn't just sprinkling between the leaves of the trees anymore—only twenty feet ahead of her was an opening clearing. Excited to see if this could be her new grounds of inhabitance, she darted forward and into the hole in the mountain's skin of leafy canopy.

It was perfect. There was a section covered by stone, but the rest was filled with grass, bushes, and small plants. Also, another important factor was that water was located nearby—if she listened carefully she could hear the crackling of a creek. She would sift through the flora later to determine which plants were edible and which were not, but overall, she had the two things that she needed most—food and water.

Which left shelter. She was going to have to build a sort of makeshift tent or house. This left her standing there with one frightening realization in mind—she had no idea how to build any sort of structure beyond a card pyramid. …she was doomed.

* * *

Regardless of her inexperience and lack of architectural knowledge, she decided to get to work anyways. She had begun to gather fallen branches and large leaves. She would strip the bark from the branches and use it to tie them together to form a wall. The leaves were going to be utilized to make a bed, pillows, and blankets.

For being a first-timer, she was feeling pretty proud of the ideas she had come up with…even if she hadn't quite put them into action yet.

Luckily, she could focus on building rather than gathering food and water because she had a week-long supply of those on person. As a ninja, especially one involved in the medical field, she always came equipped no matter where she went.

Living as a lone hermit was quickly becoming fun; those things that she had dreamed of doing as a young girl were now not only possibly, but also necessary. She had always wanted to build a playhouse—although this was a bit more serious, but maybe just as earthy—and here she was. It had always been a fantasy to live simply and off the land.

And yet, neither of these things were likely to turn out as fun as they seemed as a child.

This was her life, but really, it was her lack thereof. She was soul-searching. Both of these purposes were too easy to forget while she was immersed in her juvenile excitement, and yet the excitement was such a refreshing feeling that she didn't want to let go of it. She decided to embrace it while it lasted and postpone the contemplation and dark thinking for later hours when she would fall from the sky of fantasy and come crashing to rock-hard realism.

Carrying her organic supplies back to the clearing, she separated them into piles and began to strip the bark from the branches by using the edge of a kunai. It was a task that required a great deal of focus in order to make sure that the strips were neither too short nor too thin, otherwise they would be rendered useless.

Once she finished that, she lined up the bare branches and began to weave the bark through them and tying it once she was done. She repeated this several times until she felt certain that the branches were sturdy and well-connected.

By the time she had completed that task, the day was ending, the sun was falling, and it was taking her work-light with it. Using the remaining supplies for kindle, she started a small fire. She then lifted her eyes to the trees in search of the perfect spot to rest her self-made board on—she would be sleeping up in the trees tonight.

And there it was, right above her tiny fire—a thick branch sticking out of a trunk with another branch coming out of it. All she had to do now was carve a bit into the trunk and slide some of her board in for a bit of extra support; the rest of it would lie on the two outwardly extending branches.

It fit wonderfully and would give her an elevated, and hopefully safer, place to sleep for tonight. Tomorrow she would probably go about renovating it and making it a little homier.

For now, she climbed up and onto the board, made a comfortable pile with her leaves, and laid down. The fire flickered in every direction and cast shadows that loomed over her. It was eerie, but yet peaceful. It felt like she was sleeping amongst the dead because of the silence, but really, everything around her was incredibly alert and alive.

She thought back to his face as his mouth formed the words, "It is most unfortunate that in these tedious lives we are forced to live that we do not receive everything we want."

Unfortunate indeed.

Did he refuse to use his eyes simply to spite her? He probably could have won if he had used them. In fact, he could have won at several points throughout their battle; and then again, she could have, too. Why would he let her get away when it was clear that her intent was to take his life? …But, was it really clear even to herself? If there were moments when she could have won, why didn't she take advantage of them? Was she as sure as she had previously believed herself to be?

No, she wasn't. She knew nothing about herself. She knew the past, but understanding it was an entirely objective. There was a core to her true self that she had let go undiscovered for eighteen years; a part that she ignored, and cast away. She would rather scorn herself then make an effort to understand the logical reasoning behind her foolish actions and the selfish calculations behind her heroic ones.

Even though she believed she was strong, she didn't _know_ it. That was part of why she went after him. She blamed him for so much—no, she blamed him for everything. For every weakness she felt and every tear she cried she labeled him instigator.

_"Who are you?"_—and yet, he didn't even know who she was. In all honesty, despite her years of researching his abilities, connections, history, and whereabouts, she didn't really know him either. He was only a name, but with no structured face to match it.

She now knew what she wanted to do; she needed to fix part of herself that was broken. She needed to speak to that man, and she had a feeling that by the time she was done that she would find he had a secretly lovely face.


End file.
